Blog Description

This is a blog for the family and friends of Collin Park. He will be serving a two year mission in the Sierra Leone Freetown Mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, he left on January 24, 2013. While Collin is on his mission his Mom will be posting pictures and letters as she gets them, the content will be straight from Collin (unless otherwise noted) - spelling and punctuation will be corrected of course! Commentary and clarification may be added by his Mom as needed.UPDATE: Collin's mission was split in half! The Sierra Leone Mission included the country of Liberia when Collin first left. As of July 1, 2013, the mission was split along the border and the new mission created: the Liberia, Monrovia Mission. Collin will never see the country of Sierra Leone. He has been in Monrovia Liberia since he left the MTC in Ghana.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Because of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Liberia and Sierra Leone Missions were evacuated on August 4, 2014 and missionaries were reassigned to different missions. Collin was reassigned to the Salt Lake City Central Mission.

Monday, May 05, 2014

May 5, 2014

This week, what an adventure.

At home, they say: April showers bring May flowers. Here it is: April sun brings May storms.

Well to start off, rainy season has begun, so now it’s time
for jumping over puddles and running.
Life as a LIB missionary is sweetoo!!
This week also has been very
interesting too, lots of things have happened.
Hopefully I will be able to remember everything.

Since we are in a white washed area, we had to completely rely
on the members for help. We have an area
book that holds all the information, but since there are really no addresses
here, if you don’t know the house, you’ll never find it and the person will be
lost… which isn’t good. The addresses
here are like “Kpeleh Town,” but then you realize that Kpeleh town is about a
square mile big. LIB is sweet!! So what
we did was this, we called Emmanuel Kolleh, who was baptized in September and
is preparing to start his mission papers, he showed us pretty much the whole
area in one day. This guy is great. I thank
him so much for what he did to help us.
We did that with different people throughout the week.

We called our Branch Mission Leader who is a returned
missionary of about 5 months, man this guy is good. He was nonstop contacting people. To be completely honest, contacting is still
very hard for me. Most of my mission
people have just come up to me and asked who we are and what we do. I learned a lot from him.

In Congo Town there are about 5342346 times more people than
in Upper Caldwell (his last area) so I have a feeling that it is going to be a
lot easier for the work to progress. We
met a lot of our brothers and sisters who are investigating the church throughout
the week, one of them is Brother Trokom.
This guy is blind!! He is so
cool. He has a copy of the Book of
Mormon in braille and it’s so cool watching him read it, it’s crazy how blind
people can do that. He didn’t come to
church yesterday which was a bummer because he had been to church the two weeks
before.

My apartment is nicknamed ‘the Mansion’ by the couples
because of how huge this place is. It
has 2 master bedrooms, 2 other bedrooms and an extra bathroom, big kitchen, we
have a deep well and a water tower that holds about 1000 gallons of water, 3
dogs that love us, 2 security guards that come at 7pm and leave at 7am. The compound is on the top of a hill so the
view is awesome! One side is the ocean
which is about a 10 minute walk. The other is a view of Peace and Pagos Islands. It’s a beautiful area. Congo Town is great!!!

I know I’m leaving something out and I’m sorry but I can’t
remember. I hope you had a great week
and I love you all and miss you.

Elder Park

The White African

T.I.A.

From additional emails:

I asked him about the security guards: “We live
in the compound with the owner and he had people break in and steal from him a
while ago. The guy has money since he
lived in the states for a while and he's old so he can’t defend against rouges
so he hired people to.’

Collin’s boots were stolen last year off the front porch, so
I asked if he had gotten more: “I got
more boots a while ago. I still hate
them though, they hurt my feet. Last
year I managed most of the rainy season without them so I’m planning for that
this year!”

I asked him if there were a lot of people at church: “church attendance was good, lots of people. The place is nice. It’s fairly new and still looks good!!"

“Congo town is on your way from Central Monrovia going
towards ELWA junction which leads you to Tinker Village. This place is sweet!”

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Elder Collin Park is serving a two year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He will be teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ in Sierre Leone and Liberia (West Africa) from January 2013 until January 2015.